Challenges
The environment and conditions of the ground forces’ engagement are constantly changing by threats and risks evolution, by the situations reversibility and volatility, as well as the constant progress of equipments and technologies. Ground forces have to continuously adapt to these evolutions to give the best answer to the French Army, engaged in operational reality.
- Engagement in a more multinational environment. From now on, engagements are more often performed in a multinational environment, under the aegis of the United Nations, the EU, and NATO or of the appropriate coalitions.
- Growing action in urbanized zone. Managing operations management according to the "three blocks war" concept (simultaneous combination in time and space of coercion, violence control and humanitarian actions) is the Army’s main line of efforts. Within this framework, feedback from recent operations underlines the necessity to have forces and headquarters able to engage themselves in urban area with a wide range of actions.
- More and more digitized battlefield. Whereas the whole staff headquarters and operating centers (levels 1 to 3) is equipped with C2 systems, unit’s digitalization carries on to gradually expand to the whole French Land Forces. The 2009 objective is to have two fully digitalized operational brigades (2nd Armored Brigade and 6th Light Armored Brigade) including Logistics Brigade abilities and specialized support elements, capable of acting within the framework of a division and interoperable with other Army units.
The operational challenges for SCIPIO V1.STAB are the following:
- Preparation for deployment. The preparation for mandatory deployment before any engagement, with systematic control and evaluation, has become the main priority.
- Multinational environment.
- Violence control and humanitarian assistance. As witnessed in the past, war operations tend today towards peace-support operations (support to preventive diplomacy, restoration, preservation, peace-enforcement and peace-building).
- Military operation on urban terrain.
- Digitized battlefield.
- Joint exercises. Military forces call for joint trainings with other armies for deep amphibious, airborne and air-land operations, for air support and marine operations, and for training with Special Forces.
SCIPIO V1.STAB technical challenges which follow from these operational challenges are the following:
- Reduction of exercise preparation time. Preparation for deployment involves a very short implementation of an exercise as compliant as possible with the trainee’s operational mission. This objective requires the engagement terrain generation.
- Non military situation’s modeling (White Cell). Peace-support operations require characterizing and modeling the non-military environment of an operation scene (political, financial, humanitarian aspects, etc.). In today’s wargames this characterization is missing and thus represents a real challenge for SCIPIO V1.STAB.
- Urban terrain modeling. Current wargames are not well adapted to peace-support operations but, also, they need a better adaptation for missions on urban terrain: in this particular case, there is the city representation issue.
- Interoperability with French C2 systems (SIC, systèmes d'information pour le commandement). Today, personnels train themselves with digital SICs. These are connected to the Army’s SIC federation, in which SCIPIO is part of. The deployed SIC means are SICF (système d'Information pour le commandement des Forces) used from the Corps to the Brigade level, SIR (système d'information régimentaire) and ATLAS. Therefore, SCIPIO has to interoperate with all these systems.
(To be continued... SCIPIO V1.STAB is not over yet.)